[0xfeba]

> Forscan for Ford vehicles also has to run under Windows.

I've successfully run it with WINE. Thought, my Forscan executable was 3 years old or so and that may have changed, but I doubt it.

[bunderbunder]

The thing about WINE is that it's not necessarily solid enough to rely on at work. You never know when the next software upgrade will break something that used to work.

That's always true, of course. But, compared to other options, relying on WINE increases the chances of it happening by an amount that someone could be forgiven for thinking isn't acceptable.

[nrclark]

In my mind, I almost feel like the opposite is true. Wine is getting better and better, especially with the amount of resources that Valve is putting into it.

If you want a stable, repeatable way to wrangle a Windows tool: Wine is it. It's easy to deploy and repeat, requires no licenses, and has consistent behavior every time (unless you upgrade your Wine version or something). Great integration with Linux. No Windows Updates are going to come in and wreck your systems. No licensing, no IT issues, no active directory requirements, no forced reboots.

[amlib]

You can fix this issue by using a wine "bottle manager" like... Bottles. This allows you to easily manage multiple instances of wine installations (like having multiple windows installations) with better and easy to use tooling around it. More importantly, it also allows you to select across many system agnostic versions of wine that won't be upgraded automatically thus reducing the possibility of something that you rely breaking on you.

[realusername]

Same about windows upgrades nowadays really, there's a ton of software which just stopped working.

[the__alchemist]

When I hear cases of using Wine etc as a substitute, I can't help but think of the "We have McDonald's at home" meme!

[damion6]

If your at work, it's probably a Windows shop. Use windows. At home you can chance a bad update, and probably also have access to windows. Can always use a VM, wine is great in some cases, like WSL. Both don't meet every use case.

[russfink]

They named it “Forscan?” They really named it that, not thinking it could sound close to something else entirely unrelated?

[skyyler]

Surely you don't think the executives at Ford expect us to Power Stroke without FORScan?

[xxpor]

Volkswagen's equivalent is VAG-COM

[1oooqooq]

why bring wine into a vm discussion? just run windows in a vm too. problem solved without entering the whining about wine not being better than windows itself

[nrclark]

I work in embedded systems. In that space, it's pretty common to need some vendor-provided tool that's Windows-only. I often need to automate that tool, maybe as part of a CI/CD pipeline or something.

If I were to do it with a Windows VM, I'd need to:

  1. Create the VM image and figure out how to build/deploy it.
  2. Sort out the Windows licensing concerns.
  3. Figure out how to launch my tool (maybe put an SSH server into the VM).
  4. Figure out how to share the filesystem (maybe rsync-on-SSH? Or an SMB fileshare?).

If I do it with Wine instead, all I need to do is:

  1. Install some pinned version of Wine.
  2. Install my tool into Wine.
  3. Run it directly.